IStock Photo 8154035 © Nathan Jones

“Behind every successful screenwriter,” quipped Groucho Marx, king of the Hollywood wisecrack, “stands a woman. And behind her stands his wife.”

The days are long past when women in film were mere fodder for jokes. But how far have women really advanced when it comes to opportunities for success behind the camera? With Kathryn Bigelow’s nomination this year as Best Director for The Hurt Locker, there’s been much discussion of the fact that no woman has ever won that most prestigious of Oscars. The fact that Bigelow is up against her ex-husband James Cameron (for Avatar) gives the story additional drama. What would Groucho say now?

The odds a nomination for a Best Director Oscar will go to a female are just 1 in 101. Only four women have ever been nominated. So it's easy to lose sight of the importance of women in the early evolution of the movies.

Women screenwriters may have outnumbered men by as much as 10 to 1 in the days of silent films and the early talkies. Frances Marion was “probably the most valuable screenwriter in the American film industry in the 1920’s and into the 1930’s,” according to Texas A&M scholar Anne Morey; some 136 of Marion’s screenplays were produced. Screenwriter and producer June Mathis was the highest-paid executive in Hollywood in the mid-1920s. Well-known authors like Anita Loos and Dorothy Parker wrote screenplays.

Yet by the time the Academy Awards were established in 1929, the rapidly solidifying movie business was freezing out women. Only about 9% of screenwriting Oscars have gone to movies penned or co-penned by women.

Back in those early days, women wielded the camera and the checkbook as well as the pen. French film pioneer Alice Guy Blaché, considered the first woman filmmaker, directed over 100 films in France and America and was awarded the Légion d’Honneur in 1955. On the Hollywood Walk of Fame you can find a star for Lois Weber, who made a string of provocative, moralizing, and sometimes feminist-leaning films in the 1910s and was earning more than any other director at Universal Studios when she established her own production company in 1917. Mary Pickford, the most popular actress of her time, co-founded United Artists in 1919. Her partners? A few folks you may have heard of: D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and Pickford’s future husband Douglas Fairbanks.

Today many female directors and screenwriters maintain high profiles in Hollywood. Seasoned players like Nora Ephron (thrice Oscar-nominated) and Penny Marshall (Best Picture nomination for Awakenings) are joined by newcomers like Diablo Cody (Oscar winner for the Juno screenplay). Yet the odds an employed member of the Writers Guild of America in the film industry is female are just 1 in 5.49.

It’s no secret that the movies often objectify women on screen. Even “James Bond” himself admits it. That could help explain the relatively low numbers of women in film’s high places. A multiple profile of four prominent young female movie writers appeared in the New York Times in 2009, which reported that although “screenwriters usually don’t have stylists or publicists…the women said they feel pressure to look photogenic in a way that is not demanded of male screenwriters.”

The article appeared in the Fashion & Style section.